It feels funny to wax romantically about arcades. They were such a staple in the gaming community for a long time that it is hard to believe they are all but extinct. The nice thing is that most people can relate to gigantic screens sitting four to five feet away from a mass of plastic resembling a car cockpit or almost comical representation of a gun. The over exaggerations were part of what made the game stand out and more fun to play. Arcade Hit Pack: Gunblade: NY and L.A. Machineguns started their respective existence in that very fashion. The problem is, when the arcade installation is taken away, so is the majority of the fun.
The premise of the two games is that some soldiers need to stop robot terrorists from taking over the city. This is accomplished by holding down the trigger until they are dead. Both games are rather banal in their attempts at delivering a thrilling experience on the Wii. The camera jerks and swings to focus on popped-in enemies who take forever to aim rockets toward the screen and the low polygon counts create a visual soup of bright colors bled together. To this pack’s credit, the graphics did seem to be cleaned up. This was how the arcade games ran, but it doesn’t translate well to home consoles. This is generally where the giant gun installations would compensate for the repetitive gameplay, however the Wii-mote or Zapper aren’t worthy substitutes. The fun and action all feel forced as lazily pointing the Wii-mote towards the screen to deliver justice bored me so much, I felt sleepy after playing.
These games were also designed to devour quarters. That anxiety of losing a dollar after five minutes is lost and hitting a button to continue dulls the thrills to rounded edge. The sound effects are obnoxious and annoying when they aren’t trying to compete with the noise of other games clamoring for attention, and the choice to use the Wii-mote speaker makes the mission set-ups nearly intelligible. It is possible to blow through both games rather quickly to discover that the tame rewards aren’t worth dipping back in for seconds. Multiplayer doesn’t help matters at all since it involves subjecting another human to a poor facsimile of an arcade experience.
There isn’t much use trying to analyze the content in this combo pack of games. It feels so far removed from the arcade roots that it would be hard to believe that these were once a bonafied exhilarating arcade experience. The only saving grace is the $30 price point, essentially the price of two downloadable game titles. Still, without the smoke and mirrors of a busy arcade, this pack of games shows how shallow they are at the core.
